Quotes For Entrepreneurs–July 2014

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Quotes For Entrepreneurs–July 2014

“It is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges production so that the product may pay the wages.”
Henry Ford in “My Life and Work” [Kindle]

More context from Chapter 5 “Getting Into Production” from “My Life and Work” by Henry Ford

“If every job in our place required skill the place would never have existed. Sufficiently skilled men to the number needed could not have been trained in a hundred years. A million men working by hand could not even approximate our present daily output. No one could manage a million men. But more important than that, the product of the unaided hands of those million men could not be sold at a price in consonance with buying power. And even if it were possible to imagine such an aggregation and imagine its management and correlation, just think of the area that it would have to occupy! How many of the men would be engaged, not in producing, but in merely carrying from place to place what the other men had produced? I cannot see how under such conditions the men could possibly be paid more than ten or twenty cents a day—for of course it is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.

The more economical methods of production did not begin all at once. They began gradually—just as we began gradually to make our own parts. “Model T” was the first motor that we made ourselves. The great economies began in assembling and then extended to other sections so that, while to-day we have skilled mechanics in plenty, they do not produce automobiles—they make it easy for others to produce them. Our skilled men are the tool makers, the experimental workmen, the machinists, and the pattern makers. They are as good as any men in the world—so good, indeed, that they should not be wasted in doing that which the machines they contrive can do better. The rank and file of men come to us unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few hours or a few days.

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“You have to roll up your sleeves and be a stonecutter before you can become a sculptor–command of craft always precedes art: apprentice, journeyman, master.”
Philip Gerard

“A myth about innovation is that it is about big ideas. Of course, in the end you want an idea with the power to transform your core business. No idea ever started out as a billion-dollar one, yet large companies often start out asking for $100 million ideas. But imagine if somebody asked, in month six of e-Bay, “Do you have a $100 million idea here?” Nobody could have told you that. So instead we have to create a lot of low cost experimentation. We need lots of $25,000 and $100,000 experiments.”
Gary Hamel, in an interview with David Kirkpatrick in Fortune Sep-6-2004

“I feel my heart glow with an enthusiasm which elevates me to heaven, for nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose — a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”

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“I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition.
Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”Ingmar Bergman from “Ingmar Bergman Confides in Students” New York Times, May 7, 1981

She elaborates with an example that is very applicable to both finding co-founders and asking customers for referrals.

Do not believe, just because you’ve been around a long time and everyone knows who you are, that you don’t still have to do the homework to let your network know about you.

Several years ago, when I was at a point that I wanted to be considered for board of director positions, I sat down and, over the course of eight hours, wrote 150-something individual e-mails to everyone I knew well enough who was on a board, in service of a board, or a C-level executive: “Here I am; here are my board qualifications; here’s a link to my website that explains more about my board service. If you think I would be an appropriate candidate for a board that you work with, please let me know.” That night at a party I ran into someone on the TiVo board, and he said, “I’m so glad you reached out, because I’ve got an opportunity for you.” Even though he already knew me, my request and refresher helped him think of me for this board, which I ended up joining.

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson

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“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way–things I had no words for.”Georgia O’Keeffe

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“Learning requires unlearning.”
L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

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“It was a small boldness, but they count, too. In the cellars of the night, when the mind starts moving around old trunks of bad times, the pain of this and the shame of that, the memory of a small boldness is a hand to hold. We weren’t always cowards. There have been moments for which we needn’t apologize.”John Leonard in “Private Lives” column Feb-2-77 New York Times

The future announces itself from afar, a tentative sound of things to come drowned in the clatter of the present.”
John Gardner in “On Leadership”

This is the “twitter version” of

“…the future announces itself from afar. But most people are not listening. The noisy clatter of the present drowns out the tentative sound of things to come. The sound of the new does not fit old perceptual patterns and goes unnoticed by most people. And of the few who do perceive something coming, most lack the energy, initiative, courage or will to do anything about it. Leaders who have the wit to perceive and the courage to act will be credited with a gift of prophecy that they do not necessarily have.”
from “On Leadership” by John W. Gardner.

“There’s dangerous temptation in the nostalgic dream, in the expertise of yesteryear. We cannot live in places that no longer exist.”Frank Herbert “Listening to the Left Hand” [subscription required] Harpers Dec 1973

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“Sedate ignorance is the last stage of deterioration.”
Henry S. Haskins

Martin Eiermann (@beingandthyme): The challenge is not to gather information, but to make sense of the information we have?Dyson: Right. We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives.

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“Success is 80% Diagnosis and 20% Prescription.”
Conor Neill title of a blog post

Don’t rush to the solution. You need to go through a good diagnosis process before the listener is ready to hear the solution. If you rush to solution, the listener is not ready to trust you. Do you take time in your meetings to really ensure that everyone shares the view of what the problem is? I have been to many meetings where the conflict is really due to the fact that each person is trying to solve a different problem.

“I hate to break it to anyone, but the creation of a board, the building of a strong legal base, and, to take it a step further, tedious little things like values statements and human resource policies, are all the work of building a real company. Terms that hold founders accountable make them better founders and company builders. It ain’t all coding, selling, and raising money, people.”
Charlie O’Donnell in “Founders Run Amok“

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“If someone is making an effort to ignore you, he is not ignoring you.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb)

Your main job as a leader is to make sure everyone has what they needs. That they work together well. That collaboration is rewarded naturally in your day to day ops. That feedback loops keep everything running smoothly. And that the folks only out for themselves don’t muck up the works and hold everyone back.

The more everyone works together, the easier it is to keep on growing (up).Hugh MacLeod

h/t Harold Jarche in “Wirearchy To Scale Successfully” where he also offers a mashup between MacLeod’s graphic and Jon Husband’s definition of wirearchy: “a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility, and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.”

“Every time I’ve seen someone create a business, with the ultimate intention of getting away from that business and its customers as quickly as possible, instead of moving towards that business and its customers, it fails.”Bryan Franklin

Another good practice is transform regret into preparation by substituting “if only…” for “next time…” There was a Unix Fortune I saw once that said “s/if only/next time/g” that captures this neatly. “Two Words” by Arthur Gordon makes the same point but I cannot find the original publication source.

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“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.”
Winston Churchill

I think every entrepreneur needs a “fortress of solitude” where they can withdraw, reflect, and then return to the tumult of the marketplace.